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re: What if you seeded the atmosphere with Iridescent material that gives off light when heated?
Robert — (archived)

Hmmm...caveat: Another topic which stretches my basic knowledge. Luminescence comes in several flavors, if I recall. Sometimes it's a chemical reaction that emits a photon. Other forms involve electrons in an atom moving to a lower energy state and emitting a photon. The general idea, I think, is "charging" up a substance or "excitation"--raising energy levels--and then releasing the energy. So we're kind of talking about building a large capacitor in the atmosphere, which has solid analogies in electronics, since a capacitor consists of a material that can be excited trapped between two dielectric plates (or shells or folded layers--there are many possible geometries for a capacitor).

There's an interesting analogy, too, with a kind of device that I used to design as an explosive initiator. You charge up a very large capacitor to a very high voltage, as close as possible to filling it to capacity with electrons. Say your charging voltage was 10,000 volts, and the capacitor is connected to a sparkgap whose plates are just a little bit farther apart than the distance that would break down at 10,000V. It just sits there, until you apply a low energy pulse with a voltage just a little bit higher, enough to bridge the distance between the sparkgap plates, creating a tunnel which allows the huge stored energy in the capacitor to travel between the plates. It's electrical judo, a tiny expenditure of energy that releases a huge amount of stored energy.

So I'm thinking that this atmospheric capacitor could charge up, but it wouldn't necessarily discharge on its own (at least until the energy reaches catastrophic levels) without a little outside help. We might inject energy from the ground, using microwave bursts or optical lasers, to periodically trigger the breakdown. Oops, maybe from orbit would be better, since from the ground all we'd do is create a titanic lightning bolt. Hey, about creating a plasma tunnel between the Earth and the Moon like the one found out at Jupiter? We're talking mostly about Venus, but compared to all this other stuff we're tossing around, moving a chunk of stuff into orbit around Venus to create a moon there is child's play.

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